


sunflower still grows at night

by krbk



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dave's POV, Fluff, Fluff without Plot, M/M, Meteor fic, davekat - Freeform, has a smooch in it, sort of a character study of dave realizing hes bisexual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-29 01:54:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16734813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krbk/pseuds/krbk
Summary: It wasn’t earth-shattering when the realization hit you.It was just sort of a new awareness, a piece of knowledge that just sort of floated to the surface of your consciousness not unlike watching the small blue triangle of an 8-ball slowly break from inky black liquid.It wasn’t even that much of a question in the first place, honestly.one of those feelgood fluff fics that doubles as a character study





	sunflower still grows at night

It wasn’t earth-shattering when the realization hit you.

It was just sort of a new awareness, a piece of knowledge that just sort of floated to the surface of your consciousness not unlike watching the small blue triangle of an 8-ball slowly break from inky black liquid. 

It wasn’t even that much of a question in the first place, honestly. 

It was the gradual realization that, looking back, threw a whole lot of your past behaviors and actions into a different light. It was a culmination, but not one that shook you to your core. You just sort of accepted it like yeah, that feels right.

Things started falling into place.

Like the slope of black lips indented by sharp teeth, the long lines of limbs tangled on a shitty old couch, the crinkle of a nose in response to a proffered dirty mug of some bitter liquid masquerading as coffee. 

How you couldn’t seem to keep your eyes off of him. 

The realization that yeah, maybe your sister had been partially right about some things. 

It wasn’t like you ever had some visceral opposition to the concept. The fact was, you simply hadn’t given it any sort of serious thought before. A kid thrown into the maelstrom of an ending world, tasked with the duty of creating a new one: to put it simply, you didn’t have the time to worry about your sexuality. 

But being stuck on a meteor for three god damn years with nothing but your brain as your own personal echo chamber tends to lend itself to some self-discovery. Specifically, the kind of self-discovery that left you sort of nonplussed, sort of an internal acceptance of yourself that didn’t necessarily demand much day-to-day change, but an acceptance nonetheless. 

You didn’t find yourself acting any differently. It was similar to the time about halfway through the first year on the meteor when you looked in a mirror and noticed the beginnings of fine blonde facial hair on your previously bare skin- something inevitable, something unsurprising, something as natural as growing up. Something that had been written in your DNA the day your genetic code had been scrambled together in an ectobiology lab by a semi-competent fool. 

You had grown into it. 

So when you found yourself hanging out with Karkat more and more, it seemed as natural as breathing to notice the development of casual, passably platonic physical contact between you and him. 

Waking up on the same shitty couch as him with his tangle of dark hair slumped heavily against your upper arm, realizing that the two of you had fallen asleep while watching some romcom you both had already seen, you felt like it was the most natural thing in the world- feeling his sleep-heavy breath warming your skin even through a layer of rumpled god pajamas, even as the weight of his skull was starting to make your arm go numb. 

His presence turned into a near-constant variable in your life. Even if you weren’t necessarily exchanging words, the very fact that he was in the same room served as a sort of comfort, gave you a sense of normalcy despite the chaos that engulfed nearly every other aspect of your existence. 

Sometimes it was the wordless brush of his fingertips as you handed him a cup of ‘coffee’ when he was too engrossed in his book to even look up when you arranged your limbs on the couch next to him, comfortably resigning yourself to another day (night?) of dicking around with whatever project could occupy the hours before it was time to fall asleep again. 

Sometimes it was the way he would pull up a chair next to you while you were attempting to read one of Kanaya’s inscrutable troll romance novels and quietly crack open a book of his own and read in silence, the slow rhythmic sound of his breathing the only thing audible in the room. 

At first, your excuse for the close physical contact had been the fact that this meteor was like fucking Antarctica to your LoFaF-conditioned body and his skin radiated heat like he was some sort of space heater (troll biology???). It wasn’t until maybe the third or fourth month of testing cultural physical boundaries that you came to the realization that thermostasis might not be the only reason you spent your waking hours around him. 

Like you said, it wasn’t earth-shattering or anything. It was more of a quiet ‘oh’ as you caught yourself absently drawing him. You decided at some point that you should probably spend some of all of this fucking free time trying to teach yourself to actually draw (real art, not just shitty comics steeped in seven layers of jpeg artifacts) so you alchemized some paper and pencils and started drawing shit you found around the meteor. 

It wasn’t like there was too much to draw- the meteor was basically cold empty room after cold empty room, but occasionally you would wander down to this one lab with huge fucking floating lusii in massive tanks and try replicating the lines and shapes of the slumbering (dead? You weren’t sure) creatures on your paper. It took a month or two before you felt comfortable with a pencil in your hand, and even longer before you tried drawing anything else.

Karkat, one way or another, became your most frequent subject. Of the other residents on the meteor, he was the one most predisposed to sitting in one position long enough for you to struggle through wrangling the lines of his form onto your paper (you tried drawing Rose and Kanaya a couple of times, but you always felt a little bit weird drawing them when they were together- there was something about the way they always sat with their heads tilted together, like you were looking in on something much too intimate).

So you spent a good portion of your time casually observing his profile, bent over a book or his husktop or some other project engrossing his attention, with you sitting cross-legged in your socks at one end of the couch with your pad of paper in your lap, tracing over tentative lines that captured the gentle frown of his lips, the sharp line of his elbow resting on his knee, the soft furrow between his eyebrows that deepened when he was focusing. Your sketchbook quickly became filled with Karkat in different poses from various locations around the meteor (you drew him once when he fell asleep while reading at the table, one arm sprawled out under his head and the other resting almost delicately on the paper).

You start taking your shades off around him when the lights are dim enough. You think your own light-sensitive mutant eyes might make him feel more comfortable about his blood color, but it was honestly more for you than for him- you could count on one hand the amount of times your naked eyes had met another person’s and not registered even the slightest flinch. But Karkat didn’t say a damn thing when you would slide your glasses off before settling into the couch next to him, casually reading over his shoulder as you drifted off to sleep. It was a sort of unspoken agreement that sleeping was a joint activity now- you know for damn sure that he doesn’t sleep when you’re not around, and the only times you were able to sleep without night terrors were the times when you could feel some measure of his warm skin against you. 

Nobody ever told you that playing a game that ended the world would bring with it the side effect of lasting nightmares and insomnia. For you, you relive the ways the alternate versions of yourself died. You know that Karkat sees the people whose deaths he feels responsible for. 

You’ve become attenuated to the way Karkat’s sleeping form tightens unnaturally against your own when he’s having nightmares and you wake him with a gentle shake of his arm in the darkness and he snaps awake and looks at you with wide, scared eyes, pupils blown huge, breath catching in his throat. You never say anything, just pull him closer and wait until his breathing evens back out before falling asleep again.

You’ve been shaken awake from night terrors with tears streaming from the corners of your eyes and phantom pains still echoing through your body, reliving the death of some doomed iteration of yourself. Karkat’s unnaturally warm hands curled firmly around your biceps (his sharp nails digging into your skin) didn’t chase the fear away entirely, but it was a sort of comfort knowing that he understood. He was a Knight who failed to protect others. You were a Knight who failed to protect yourself. There was a symbiosis found in this shared pain. 

Neither of you mentioned this during the waking hours. 

The skin-to-skin contact becomes even more frequent- a casual brush of his hand across your shoulderblades when you’ve got your headphones on and he knows you can’t hear his approach, alerting you to his presence; a tangle of black hair rested against your arm as he lazily watches you mix beats together on your computer (you offer him one of your earbuds); his deep breathing when he inevitably falls asleep against you (you slow down the tempo of your music as to not wake him). 

One day, a couple of hours after waking up, you’re curled against one arm of the couch, scribbling on cheap alchemized printer paper with your shades slid up on top of your head to keep your hair from falling into your eyes (you were in definite need of a haircut). You hear the soft scuffle of worn-down sneakers from behind you and don’t even need to turn around to know that it’s Karkat. The couch springs sigh softly under his weight as he sits down close enough for you to feel his body heat. 

You glance at him out of the corner of your eye. He’s gazing absently at your shitty drawing, mind obviously elsewhere. You half expect him to fall asleep next to you. That’s what you’re expecting, anyway, when you notice him shifting positions.

You’re so comfortable with his natural movement around you that it takes his gentle palm against your chin, tilting your face towards him, to really bring your attention to the fact that he’s now close enough for you to count every single one of his dark eyelashes and the line of faint freckles across the bridge of his nose and you find yourself almost trying to do both before you’re very quickly and efficiently short-circuited by the entirely unexpected warm press of his lips against yours. 

Your pencil clatters onto the floor. 

Karkat pulls back after a second, grey skin flushed a dusky red. His eyes flutter open, meeting yours and quickly looking away. 

You pull him in again. 

His lips part under yours. 

For a moment, the two of you share the same breath.

You can feel his heartbeat.

This. This might be earth shattering.

**Author's Note:**

> hi! thanks for reading! drop by @pearlecsent on tumblr or @redglaree on twitter to tell me what you think!


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